Apple is preparing a major change for Macs. The company hired an expert on ARM processors

Apple has big plans for ARM processors. With how powerful the chips are capable of being produced, there has been talk for over a year that it's only a matter of time before ARM chips make it beyond the iPad and iPhone platforms. The arrival of ARM chips in some Macs suggests several things. On the one hand, we have the constantly increasing performance of mobile ARM chips, and then also the Catalyst project, which allows developers to port iOS applications (ARM) to macOS (x86). And last but not least, there is the recruitment of employees who are more than suitable for this transition.

One of the last of its kind is the former head of CPU development and system architecture at ARM, Mike Filippo. He has been employed by Apple since May and offers the company first-class expertise in the development and application of ARM chips. Filippo worked at AMD from 1996 to 2004, where he was a processor designer. He then moved to Intel for five years as a systems architect. From 2009 until this year, he worked as the head of development at ARM, where he was behind the development of chips such as Cortex-A76, A72, A57 and the upcoming 7 and 5nm chips. So he has a wealth of experience, and if Apple plans to expand the deployment of ARM processors to a larger number of products, they probably couldn't have found a better person.

If Apple actually manages to develop an ARM processor powerful enough for macOS's needs (and modify the macOS operating system enough to be used with ARM processors), it will free Apple from its partnership with Intel, which has been quite uncomfortable in recent years. Over the last few years and generations of its processors, Intel has been rather flat-footed, has had problems with the onset of a new manufacturing process, and Apple has sometimes been forced to significantly adjust its plans for introducing hardware to correspond with Intel's ability to introduce new chips. O security issues (and the subsequent effect on performance) with processors from Intel not to mention.

According to behind-the-scenes sources, ARM should introduce the first Mac drive next year. Until then, there is plenty of time to debug hardware and software compatibility, anchor and expand the Catalyst project (i.e. port native x86 applications to ARM), and convince developers to properly support the transition.

Source: Macrumors